‘History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.’

How valid is this statement when talking about the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918?

Face coverings to be worn in public … funerals limited to fifteen minutes’ duration … no entry to towns or permission to travel on public transport without official certificates … hefty fines for those breaking the rules … … hopes for vaccines … All of the above sound like tactics for coping with Covid-19 in the 2020s; in fact they were in place in 1918 as the world coped with a fourth year of war and a flu pandemic that would kill more people than the most lethal outbreak of the Black Death in the 1340s.

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Just before breakfast time on 11 March 1918, Sergeant Albert Gitchell, a cook at Camp Funston in Kansas, USA, reported to the hospital block with what he described as ‘a bad cold’. He had a headache, sore throat, pain in his muscles and a high fever. No sooner was he admitted than Corporal Lee Drake was at the front desk describing the same symptoms. Moments after that, Sergeant Adolph Hurley would join them on a ward set aside for those with contagious conditions. Surgeon Colonel Schreiner found himself all at once dealing with a flood of ailing servicemen. By lunchtime that day he had 107 men struggling with near identical symptoms: ‘Fever 104 degrees. Low pulse, drowsiness and photophobia. Eyes reddened and throat inflamed.’

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Spain was a neutral country and since her journalists were not bound by wartime censorship, excited reporting of the pandemic led to the disease being labelled ‘Spanish Flu’. With millions of men on the move on account of the war, it is impossible now to say where the first cases originated. It hardly matters. As 1918 wore on there were outbreaks throughout Africa and Asia, in North and South America, in Europe and in the islands of the south Pacific. In India its effects were especially severe, with as many as fifty deaths per thousand people. As with the Covid-19 outbreak that began in 2019, there were many who pointed at China as a likely source.

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Wherever it originated, it was deadly. There are countless stories of people taking ill in the morning and dying the same day. For many there was the complication of cyanosis – a drop of oxygen in the blood so that they slowly suffocated, bloody froth trailing from mouths and noses. By the time the storm of the pandemic had blown itself out, in 1920, as much as a third of the world’s population had been infected. Estimates of the overall death toll range from 20 to 100 million – as much as 5 per cent of the 1.9 billion people alive at the time.

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In 1918 Europe especially, and the world in general, was exhausted by war. Populations weakened by food shortages were in no state to face a new variant of an already dangerous disease like influenza. The irony for those still alive in the early spring of 1918 was that a killer more efficient than the war was on its way. By the time the guns fell silent, bullets and shells, barbed wire and poison gas – as well as all manner of other illnesses – had claimed 20 million lives. The pandemic that followed on another horse of the apocalypse would claim twice that number and more.

Find the word in bold in the passage which matches the definition.

In what ways were conditions during the Spanish Flu similar to those during Covid?

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What symptoms did the Spanish Flu cause?

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Spanish journalists did not have to worry about censorship because…

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Spanish journalists did not have to worry about censorship and so…

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Why did Spanish Flu spread so quickly?

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What evidence is there that the Spanish Flu was devastating?

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______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Why was the world’s population in 1918 so vulnerable to a pandemic?

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What conclusion can you draw from the graph?